Can you hear that? A certain high frequency hum which, until recently, was perceptible only to dogs, bats, and cryptography cognoscenti? It’s the mounting buzz over “blockchain”—an umbrella term referring to a number of shared ledger services that promise to revolutionize every aspect of social and political exchange, from financial transactions to medical data, voter … Read more
The constant increases in technological capacity, prevalence of automation and machine assistance, and the advancement of bio-tech, artificial intelligence, and medical technologies, expedite the tendency to view the issue of human subjectivity through a dichotomy of man/machine. This framing pre-inscribes a frictional relationship between man and machine, as if machines desire to, … Read more
In the first workshop of the fall semester, Lars Hinrichs brought his knowledge of English Language and Linguistics to the DWRL for an introduction to R and Twitter. While Twitter’s reputation certainly preceded itself, the workshop began with an introduction to R — a necessary introduction for those of us unfamiliar with current research practices … Read more
In high school, works cited pages always gave me pause. I would print the specifications of the bibliography style and take great care not to misplace a period or a comma. Invariably, it took me far longer than I expected. When I was in college, I started to use sites like Easybib. But by then, … Read more
As part of our spring 2017 Speaker Series, the Digital Writing & Research Lab hosted Dr. Laurie Gries, whose lecture “Doing Digital Visual Studies” reflects upon and extends the research she undertook in her award-winning book Still Life with Rhetoric: A New Materialist Approach for Visual Rhetorics. In her longitudinal study of Shepard Fairey’s “Obama … Read more
Since you’re reading this online publication, I imagine that you, like me, leave hundreds of digital traces every day. A lot of these traces are things we can see–things like emails, texts, blog posts, twitter posts, photographs, Youtube comments, or Facebook likes. But today I’m particularly interested in the invisible, unintentional digital traces we leave–things … Read more
In an upcoming lesson plan, I introduce some ways in which visualization be used to analyze elements of a literary text such as genre, theme, motifs, or plot structure. However, that lesson plan focuses predominantly on visual works. What are some of the ways in which visualization could be used to explore sound … Read more
By Sierra Mendez & Sarah Welsh Maybe we can begin by blaming Plato for his view that math, specifically geometry, was the one perfect truth in the world–a belief systematically strengthened by science’s insistent reliance on empirical, numerical data as “truth.” These notions have been adopted into the public conscious, leaving people with the tendency … Read more
In writing and literature classes, we teach our students to gather evidence from close reading in order to support their arguments. In what ways could data visualization charts actually aid processes of reading? The visualization tool Voyant allows the user to track the relative appearance and context of specific words and phrases in a specific … Read more
By Sierra Mendez & Sarah Welsh This data visualization lesson plan focuses on image manipulation across a variety of sources. It matters to us and to the classroom because 21st century forms of media and knowledge dissemination demand that we be able to interpret and utilize visual forms of information. Photos are a key component … Read more